All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “The captain cracked me across the shoulder with the butt of his AK-47. My blue helmet fell into the mud. ‘Now helmet is off. You are lucky. You know why? Why is a very big question,’ the captain said. ‘Is most important question, Why? Why? Why? Why?’ he screamed.

  “Then, he smiled. ‘Fuck.’ He took hold of my hand, the pupil of his eye black to the core, and I looked into that blackness. The cold in his hand a biting cold. A cold that was not the hand of death. It was the cold hand of evil. (I look at myself every morning in the mirror, my priest, waiting to see if my eyes have gone black.) That was the sign of evil, the blackness of the eyes, that cold hand.

  “The captain, he saw an old man sitting by the side of the tarmac, sitting there braiding flower stems into a bouquet. He went over and shot the old man. Dead. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I yelled, ‘why did you do that? Why?’ He said, ‘Exactly. Why? Now you are a philosopher.’ Waving his arm, ‘You go. Pass freely.’ Before I could go he laughed, holding up a weighted sack. ‘Here is freedom,’ saying he had in the sack the severed head of another warlord. ‘No trouble,’ he said to the sack. ‘You too are free.’

  “He bowed to me. Courteous. A fellow soldier. ‘Fuck,’ I said, banging my helmet on the tarmac like I was crazy. ‘What a fucking thing to do!’ He screamed, ‘Fuck you to fucking hell. You do not want to be on bad side with me.’ Saluting. He gave me the V for victory sign, telling me, ‘Come into my hills, I will kill you too.’ I didn’t know what to do. You’re a priest, what can you do? Pray? Good works? There was nothing I could do. Not then, and not later at a crossroads when I saw that the head of the other warlord had been taken out of the sack and mounted on a pike, eyes closed, the mouth open and stuffed with oxlips and violets.

  “A mouthful of flowers at a crossroads. A shrine to all those numbed men out there with their need, their inexplicable crazed need for utter cruelty, trying to keep a peace where there was no peace, no battle lines, only skirmishes, fire-fights, hordes of refugees and camps, and militias made up of stupid ordinary men who were not just killing each other but decapitating, raping, and dismembering. Killing off the boys, the babies, trying to kill the future, gang-fucking the women and girls to contaminate the bloodlines, to infect the heart, to sow hatred.

  “And nobody wanted our Blue Berets, not even the local priest who, totally stripped down, bald-ass naked, bicycled across the airport tarmac to his gutted church, crossing the air to ward off outsiders, to keep us away as he passed the airport’s tiny lounge where an officer who had flown in from Brussels stood and spoke to us, to his Blue Berets: ‘…very well, they choose to suspend the accepted rules for conducting civilized warfare. Well, if two play at the game – and that is what they are doing – then those two sides are in violation…we abide by rules…’

  “‘Does that mean we are civilized, sir?’

  “‘That means we are to enforce the peace by engaging in no retaliatory aggressive action, not against either side, we are to stand between…’

  “‘Between is where, sir?’

  “‘Where it has to be.’

  “‘Could that be anywhere, sir?’

  “‘Anywhere is where it is.’

  ‘“Yes, sir.’”

  He invited me more and more into his house, his family home, where I realized he talked about all houses the same way. Houses were alive.

  “There is life, teeming life,” he said, “moving in the cellars. Vermin in the walls, from the dust mites we can never see in our beds to the raccoons playing hide-and-seek under the roof.”

  He had a large bookshelf full of books on woodworms, rodents, centipedes, squirrels, ants, cockroaches, and especially termites. And it was the termites who seemed to fascinate him the most, largely because of the way they built huge insulated housing hives. It was like, he said, they had their own military point men. They’d send out blind feeders – their own Blue Berets, he called them – who set up forward positions, stone-cold blind but still able to somehow survey the hills.

  And then there were the infiltrating carpenter ants, sawing into support beams and the floor scantling, tunnelling and leaving only tiny mounds of superfine sawdust in the corners of a house. Apparently he had had his own infestation in his own house – ants nesting in the wood framing above the basement concrete blocks.

  He had sprayed all six of his rooms and the basement with a chemical called antheletymene, and then he sat down, watching and waiting for them to come out of the walls. He told me that the stillness in which he sat was like his stillness as a sniper: as he’d waited for men to come into his x line of sight, but the antheletymene had turned out to be so strong, so toxic, that his nerves had turned to neon lighting in his brain. He could feel his heart ricochet in his rib cage. He must have been taking the chemical in through his pores as if he were an ant himself, and it had brought him to his knees, listening to snakes whistling.

  Not long after he told me about the ants, he went on the porch into the house to get a glass of water, and then I heard him yelling. I found him in front of a floor-length mirror in the hall, berating himself in the mirror. “But I wasn’t yelling at myself,” he told me later. “I was yelling at a man who was yelling at me, a killer, and, because I wanted nothing to do with him I took off my hat, and then put it on, trying to get my hat off and on before he could get his hat off and on, but he spread his fingers against his side of the glass, like he wanted our fingertips to meet, and they almost did, but I pulled back because he had widened his eyes into the kind of eyes that I’ve seen before – the eyes of a man who has seen oxlips and knows they’re a sign of spring in the mouth of a dead man. And I’d no sooner yelled at him, ‘You don’t scare me,’ than you came along, asking me, ‘Can I help?’ – ‘Help? What d’you mean help?’”

  Earlie gave me a drawing, a drawing he says of the man he saw in the mirror. The man has the nighttime stars of Van Gogh in his eyes, stars crisped to black. I feel the insurgent embrace of suffering in his face. It bleeds to the edges, or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it is terror.

  What he said, so matter of fact it was kind of frightening, was that listening to snakes whistling was just like being back in the Medak Pocket, like he was tracking the palpable scent of human fear, of panic, “following my nose, nosing around outside of a small field hospital that the UN had set up close to a gutted farmhouse and an abandoned orphanage.

  “A half-track had ground razor wire down into the mud, but after the rains, the wire had risen up. I saw a sliced-off toe, like a white bud about to flower in the mud.”

  Apparently he’d kept the toe bone as a souvenir. To remember how they grew things there.

  “And how they have butchered their own lives, and I can see it all but I can’t see the answer to the question, the Why? Which is why I want you to imagine the dead carts I’ve seen upended in the mud. I want you to step into my shoes, see that there was still a dead body in one of the carts, the long handles sticking straight up in the air like prongs to a tuning fork (I thought it’d be perfect to find Beethoven between the prongs, brooding on the B-flat harmonies of Moscow on fire), the clack clack clack of .50 calibre machine-gun fire up in the hills, clack clack, it was like the tapping of a blind man’s cane in my brain, the red tracers streaking into the trees clumped behind the orphanage, the walls that had been buckled in by mortars, the fruit trees between the orphanage and the open graves in full bud – white and lemon-yellow – the same white and lemon-yellow as the gay spring scarf I saw on a nurse after I walked through a skeletal-standing doorframe of a house whose front wall had been blown away, a television still on in the back room, blaring so loud I’d slid along with my back to a wall to see who was watching the TV and what I saw was CNN, this reporter with his wacko angular Australian twang, his tone of pained urgency as he told me that mass graves and a concentration camp had been found outside a village just ten minutes away, and I thought, Yes, because I’d been at that concentration camp ten days earlier just ten minutes away from where I was now in
a back kitchen where a nurse, a Red Cross band on her head and a white and lemon-yellow scarf around her shoulders, a woman who looked to be in her late thirties, was lying on her back on the floor with her legs spread and angled in the air, angled like you could hang your washing on her ankles, and between her legs there was a naked boy – a stripling boy of ten or twelve with thin wrists and narrow buttocks – a boy, perhaps from the orphanage – and standing there against the kitchen wall, cradling my rifle across my chest – I couldn’t believe how glistening white her thighs were – and the boy’s body, too – their embrace a stillness in my mind’s eye, and I thought – I should report to CNN, I have found a stillness, a toe that is in bud and a stillness – until she turned her head and, looking sluttishly pleased, she winked at me, as if she was sure I would understand why she was there having a beautiful boy-child fuck her, probably for the first time in his life, down there in the tile and plaster rubble, down there in the reek of cordite.

  “I went back out into the yard – I wasn’t sure whether I was pissed off or aroused – a yard that was attached to the field hospital that was flying our blue flag, to eight cots in the hospital, three corpses on the cots, and one squat, heavy-shouldered, iron-haired nurse. Sheets caked with blood covered the sick and injured, not the dead. The corpses were naked (nothing, it seems to me, so conveys the lousy vulnerability and dead-eyed futility of struggling to live as a limp penis lying along the thigh of a dead naked man). Without thinking, I laid my hand on the shoulder of a corpse whose face was yellowish green, his left eye closed below a wound in his forehead, his right eye open, staring straight up. I shut my left eye and stared down, sniper to sniper, I thought, as the nurse, who had liverish bags under her eyes, said, ‘You want to do something good?’

  “‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’m a good man.’

  “‘You find the one with the hammer, you kill him.’

  “‘Like a good man should,’ I said.

  “She turned to a man lying on a cot. His wound over his collarbone was running pus. She applied a poultice that smelled of sulphur. It looked like a goat’s or sheep’s liver.

  “‘Jesus Christ, what’s that?’ I asked her.

  “‘Is poultice,’ the nurse said. ‘Do your own business.’

  “‘I’m going,’ I said, ‘to check out the orphanage.’

  “‘The hammer. Not forget. Do something good.’

  “So, my priest, like I set out to find you in your church, I set out to look for the hammer in the orphanage to do something good out there among the fruit trees, some burned to a bone crisp, others loaded with white and lemon-yellow buds and I thought – though I didn’t smoke – I had this crazy thought that in a movie about my life this would be the time, the place, to stop and smoke a cigarette. And then, in the movie this would be the moment, with me standing there relaxed and guileless, I’d get shot by an unseen marksman, shot as I took my first deep satisfying drag, and in my memory’s eye that shot taught me to always keep an unseen marksman in my mind’s eye, sniper to sniper.

  “In the orphanage, in the dining hall, under the wall icons of two saints with fire-eyes inlaid in silver – on the other side of several rows of polished oak dining-hall tables – I found a dead woman lying on the bloodstained linoleum floor, a young naked woman, spread-eagled. Nailed alive to the linoleum, naked and nailed down, at her hands and feet, with long roofer’s nails – nailed and raped.

  “Until she was dead.

  “Her bones were still in her skin…but not because she hadn’t tried to rise up out of her skin’s skin…her back was still arched up off the floor, surging in a last attempt to get loose of the nails…her mouth wide open, her perfect white teeth, eyes bulged out of their sockets. An empty Champagne bottle by her foot, the room stifling. Shit and rotting flesh. Flies. No white butterflies. Wobbling fluorescent green flies. Hundreds of them. I wanted to get my own bones out of my own body, sickened, in a fury at the futility of young bodies piling up till the trenches overflowed. The rats feeding. Then a pause in the clock happened. It always happens. A little cuckoo bird sings… Time. Peace. Except, there’s always a rat in the clock. There is always a rat in the clock behind the bird – behind the door – (the bird thinks he has found his escape hatch, so dumb in his memory that he springs out and thinks this every hour on the hour) – and the bird sits out there and he sings, but always the spring goes CLICK and the pause is done even before the mustard gas and the smoke and ash from the furnaces settle and the bird gets snatched back into the clock and the door slams shut, CLACK – and it is Hello Pol Pot, Pray for us; Hello Churchill, the Crisper of Dresden, Pray for us; Hello Stalin, Pray for us; Hello Pinochet, Pray for us; Hello Mao, Pray for us; Hello Hitler, Pray for us; Hello to all the Doctor Kissingers and Strange-loves. And then, sometimes – except for the moving hands on the clock – there is that pause, that calm. There is a lull in which, as soldiers, as Blue Berets, as peacekeepers, we sit tall in our tanks at a crossroad, models of rectitude, but soon the rats begin to feed, rape, behead. They are the generals, the police, the bishops, the mullahs, the rebbes, the tribal militias… And so, what was I to do? What good was to be done for my iron-haired nurse? What was required? What is required as the door slams shut, CLACK, and it all begins again, the eruptions begin again, the buboes, as the unbelievable becomes all too believable, when a woman disembowels a man and tries to stuff his live baby son into his stomach. I was outraged, I, who can sit in utter stillness for three or four hours – letting all the anxiety drain out of me, absolutely relaxed, not limp – relaxed into focus, complete focus, coiled for action in my mind’s eye, trusting my eyes since seeing is believing, coiled yet at ease, as if I felt the moment before and the moment after happen at the same time – a moment so satisfying – and so prolonged in its tension within that stillness, in the , the x of the crosshairs, that once or twice I almost did not pull the trigger, wanting to hold on to the feeling, but as I told you, my priest, O my priest, the decision I made – not just to disobey my orders but to kill certain men, and one woman – was taken in all intellectual awareness, a decision to act, and by completing the act, completing its virtue, my own act of what I might call virtuous violence.”

  “Ah yes,” I said to him. “Aquinas, a matter of intellectual virtue independent of morality.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “I was not wrong to have sought you out. You get the point exactly, intellectual virtue independent of morality. Which is why I have let you look into my eyes. I’ve let you see my ghosts, feeling no rectitude, as I rehearse in my mind how I hunted down, on separate occasions, split off from my squad, those I intended to kill. So let us make no mistake, my priest, I knew exactly what I was doing… I have not only seen evil but more important, I understand that I have seen evil. I have seen it in an offering of oxlips in a dead mouth at an empty crossroad. It’s not the thought that counts, it’s acting on the thought. I tracked nine men and a woman who had become monsters of evil. Monsters. Not machine-gun jockeys. But monsters who believed they were safe, safe to go back up into their hills, confident that those of us who were there to keep a peace would not only never kill them but would protect them from each other. But not me. I drew each one of them into my crosshairs, into the magnifying circle of my telescopic sight. I was their intimate, up close, as God is with us, up close, as God is our intimate from a great distance. Patient. Absolutely patient. Setting up the perfect shot from a distance, so that no one would know where the shot had come from, I shot them dead in their shoes. I eradicated evil.

  – the hammer, seated on a kitchen chair, bearded, lifted his hand. Perfect. He’d been to the market. He held a slice of bread warm from his wife’s oven, then slumped over his kitchen table, bleeding from the mouth into a soup bowl

  – the airport warlord, sitting cross-legged on the stone step to his village well, petting a dog, his string bag full of tomatoes, and then his body jerks back, the dog licks blood from his blown-open throat

  – a man, an ex-doctor, who
was known as the Stitcher because he stitched up the mouths of people he was going to kill, once sewing a live mouse into the mouth of an old woman, driving her insane

  – a professor, smiling, pleased with himself, offering a book to his wife as I’d seen him offer the hand he’d severed from a six-year-old girl to a guard dog on a chain

  – the woman who disembowelled a father so that she could then try to bury alive his baby son inside his stomach, the father, of course, left still alive for this

  – a tinsmith at his worktable wearing a leather apron, making a breadbox, who had used his soldering irons to burn out the eyes of a mullah, shot from behind, blowing out forehead, bone, and eyes

  – the man who’d sowed a playing field outside the front door of a kindergarten with land mines and then had hurried all the children out to die as they tried to run and dance through the mines, shot clean through the heart as he sat at home with his own children

  – a woodsman who was a militia gunner who cleaved a woman’s skull from crown to chin with a power saw, gutting it and then placing her hands, severed at the wrist, in the skull, shot between the eyes as he took outdoor Communion

  – the gas station attendant who, as a captain, drowned men by forcing a nozzle into their throats and then firing them up as human bombs (my only near-miss), his jaw blown away

  – and finally, the commandant who drowned a prisoner every day in the camp cesspool, shot as he bathed in a mountain pool, shot in the shoulders so that he could not swim to stop himself from slowly sinking

  “Ten times, my priest. I killed, my priest, ten people.

  “And my killing them was an act as impersonal as a hangman is probably impersonal, unlike the killing of someone like my mother or father – or you – would be personal, but then. of course, I can’t kill my mother. I never knew my mother. And I can’t kill my father because he is already dead. He died just before I went into the army, though he still moves around in the house. I know him by his step. I hear the creaking of the floors, his step slow and hesitant, his presence like an incursion, a shadow moving in and then moving out of me along with my other ghosts. I’ve decided that refugees are just more living ghosts, like those ten ghosts, who inhabit me the way vermin inhabit a house. They leave behind a superfine trail of sorrow, a sorrow that heaps up and sits heavy on my mind, especially in the morning when I find myself not refreshed by sleep but overcome at the beginning of the day by an unfathomable ache, by what I believe is not despair, something beyond Why?”